The Importance Of Growing Up In Stephen King's The Body

Growing up is hard. It has been one of the hardest challenges that I have dealt with in my life and I am not even close to finishing it. We do it all of our lives, it doesn't end at high school or college, but instead we are always learning from our mistakes and our own past. In the Stephen King novella, The Body, a boy named Gordie struggles to understand that in order to move on, he has to let go his of friends and leave his past at Castle Rock. He is determined to keep himself intact, preserving the only part of himself that he holds dear, his friends, and the fun times they have had.

As the boy's adventures begin to progress in “The Body,” Gordie begins to realize the future he imagined can’t be. Chris lectures Gordie throughout the story

There are always those moments in life where you can remember clearly, every fine detail engraved in the memory. Whether it was an exciting vacation to being at home, they still are important to us, in our very own unique way. One of Gordie’s rememberable moments was in the beginning of the journey when they started off on their adventure. They were walking on the tracks and had just got across Beeman’s field. They had their shirts around their waists and were walking on the railway with the hot sun over them. Gordie still remembers the exact details years after their friendship, “I'll never forget that moment. However old I get. The hands on my watch stood at twelve o’clock and the sun shone down with cruel heat. “ (15). He goes on to describe the fine details, “ In front of us were the railway tracks, and the sun seemed to send us messages off the metal. The Castle River was to our left and to our right some empty land, covered in small bushes.” (15). In Gordie’s mind, he has every very fine detail of that moment. Memories like those give us a sense of self, they define who we are and as a result become a part of us. Everyone has memories that stay with us, those become the most important part of us because of how clearly we can still remember them. I have memories from the hiking trips I took during my scouting years. Memories like looking west on the peak of Isle Royale,

He could never understand why they never found it, it was nowhere near the body or tracks. Years after the trip, when he was twenty-one, he hiked out to the site and tried to looking for it. Looking at the text we can see that Gordie had a reason to be out there looking for that bucket, “I feel sure that somewhere, to one side of the tracks, I would find the bucket. It would show that there had once been a thirteen-year-old Gordon Lachance.” (67). He continues by mentioning that his goal was to connect to his past, “It’s a stupid idea, of course, but the line between childhood and adulthood is narrower than most people like to think. And at times we all feel closer to the children we once were than to the boring, sensible adults we have become. (67) . What he means by this is that when you grow up, adulthood is a fast transition and he had finally realized that. His goal was to salvage a piece of history from his past so he can hold something dear to him, the trip he took with his friends in the summer of 1960. Many of us grow up learning the value of saving memories in order to save one’s past. This is how many keep parts of themselves intact, with the photos, videos, and artifacts that we surround ourselves with. Gordie was looking for the bucket because he never had something to represent that trip to him.